the thing I hate with model shots is they are so heavily touched up with photoshop that they lose all sense of the person who is being shot.. there skin is touched up to appear flawless, muscles are adjust, eyes are tweaked to appear to "sparkly" or appear more apparently "dark and mysterious" eye brows are WAY over done and some of those photos have really poor highlighting work in an attempt to make the model "pop" out of the image.. plus some are WAY over sharpened.

lilTanker saidthe thing I hate with model shots is they are so heavily touched up with photoshop that they lose all sense of the person who is being shot.. there skin is touched up to appear flawless, muscles are adjust, eyes are tweaked to appear to "sparkly" or appear more apparently "dark and mysterious" eye brows are WAY over done and some of those photos have really poor highlighting work in an attempt to make the model "pop" out of the image.. plus some are WAY over sharpened.

ThenThe chainPendantPecs have had additional darkening under the pecs to enhance sizeas well as his abs.

These are all incredibly minor enhancements, but they are there, the average person wouldn't have a clue that these things have been touched up except for maybe the eyes, the artist who did him knows and understand subtlety and has put in time and care to make sure he doesn't appear "fake" but he has still be processed.

It's an unfortunate thing these days, absolutely NO model appears in any professional advertising media without some work, while many models will swear black and blue that nothing was done to the photo beyond the basics (colour adjustment) I've never seen nor heard of anyone using a model photo as is.

some of the first things that will be adjusted (if needed)Stray hairs, eye colour, eye "twinkle", muscular definition (for men), curve adjustment (for women) and usually at least a basic adjustment to colour/sharpness..

lilTanker saidthe thing I hate with model shots is they are so heavily touched up with photoshop that they lose all sense of the person who is being shot.. there skin is touched up to appear flawless, muscles are adjust, eyes are tweaked to appear to "sparkly" or appear more apparently "dark and mysterious" eye brows are WAY over done and some of those photos have really poor highlighting work in an attempt to make the model "pop" out of the image.. plus some are WAY over sharpened.

First, I follow some of the blogs like Homotography that reproduce most of the fashion-advertising campaigns every season.

It seems to me that most every decent person knows what fashion and modeling have already done to women. Basically, female models are skeletons to which bits are added as necessary in Photoshop (and other programs). I have a real problem with that not because it is unnatural, and certainly not for artistic reasons, but because it is actually confusing women into killing themselves.

The trend is so extreme and obvious that I just wonder what on Earth it actually is all about. Doesn't it seem weird that the general population has gotten heavier while the social iconography about what is actually beautiful has gone into a territory that is not achievable in real life?

When we were talking about women I always had the feeling that some suppressed rage was at work from the male-dominated design world. It occurred to me that it is somehow easier to objectify and render alien a woman to whom one may not feel a physical attraction.

Designers all swear this is about drape, etc. but that is bullshit (real designers like Christian Dior actually new how to drape on actual women).

So now it seems that this trend towards unnatural thinness has drifted over into men. The male models in Milan and Paris are so thin and androgynous that it is really pretty unbelievable. I don't care a lick about the gender dimension, but the health impact is really devastating. A man who is 2 meters high and weighs 65 kilos is NOT healthy.

This guy, Nick Denbeigh, is obviously a "fitness" model. He is supposed to look athletic and muscular. Great, and he looks amazing. The photographs are actually stunning.

Sorry to ramble a little bit, but photographs haven't ever actually been reality. Photography isn't meant to be a 1 for 1 translation of the literal world. Also, photos have been worked since the dawn of photography. In a larger sense you can think that the statues that you see of a Caesar or of a Greek athlete weren't likely based on any sort of reality. Michaelangelo's David is, at least, as unreal as that portrait of Madonna (the David is actually far more exaggerated than Madge).

What is about the retouching of photos like this that seems to upset so many people (myself sometimes included)? Do you think it is an issue of the "uncanny valley"? I am really proposing this as a serious question (to which I don't believe I have an answer).

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics.[1] The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness."

what ursamajor said about photography, history, and models; plus this man is hot and flawless (abstractly that is) -- and yet doesn't get my juices flowing really. More hotly erotic or absolutely handsome/beautiful males are out there, and GQ Jock's example is more moving for me than the "glamor" shots of Nick Denbeigh.